The whole world hated me and my music," Yoko Ono remembers saying
when asked
to compile material from her catalogue for a 1992 boxed set. "Let's bury
it
and leave it alone." The executives at Rykodisc did not, and the ensuing
6-CD
collection, Onobox, sparked critical hosannas that continued with last
year's
album of new material, Rising, and its subsequent tour. Now, for the
first
time, Rykodisc has begun reissuing 11 Yoko Ono albums, replete with enhanced
artwork,
revelatory bonus tracks, and a marketing campaign that's simpatico with Ono's
sense
of humor about her often maligned yet frequently brilliant body of work:
"Ono
-- Oh yes!"

The first three installments are collaborations with John Lennon, long
sought
on compact disc by Beatles' completists. Unfinished Music No. 1: Two
Virgins
(1968) is perhaps the best remembered of the trilogy, displaying the
unabashed couple
naked on the cover. "Well, John thought of that!" laughs Ono in her
ground-floor
office at the Dakota building in New York City. "We could have looked
better.
I was four or five months pregnant. So, between John and I, we would say,
`This is
actually three virgins.'"

A spiritual cousin to the Beatles' "Revolution #9," the sound collage
of
Two Virgins was followed a year later by Unfinished Music No. 2:
Life With
Lions. Even with a recording of her dying baby's heartbeat and cover
photos that
chronicled both the Lennons' hospital stay at the time of that miscarriage --
as
well as the drug bust that hampered John's later quest for U.S. citizenship
-- Ono
views it with some emotional distance. "All these practical things that
happened
were like, almost happening outside of us."

This emotional distance comes because Ono measures and marks her life as
art;
her wedding album is theactual Wedding Album (1969),
packaged
with the couples' marriage license, photos, drawings, and press clippings. On
the
CD is an audio-verité diary of the couple's infamous honeymoon bed-in
for peace
called "Amsterdam." So, did the bed-in change anything? "It
might
have," says Ono. "That's another thing that's funny, because people
were
scorning us. They were very upset with us. They were angry. They didn't think
we
had a sense of humor about it."

It certainly takes a sense of humor to listen to "John &
Yoko,"
the 22-minute recording of the dynamic duo repeating each others' names from
separate
ends of Abbey Road studios, at first tenderly, then thunderously. "I
don't think
we were just screaming each other's name," she states firmly. "It's
music.
It's music. It starts with a kind of pianissimo and kind of
largo.
And then it goes on increasing in speed as well. And then it goes into
crescendo
-- I mean, that's music."

Stretching the boundaries of what is and isn't music is a hallmark of the
Lenono
works; they're filled with tape loops, found sounds, and samples, all
elements that
later found homes in the ambient, hip-hop, and electronica genres. The roots
for
these influential pieces are in Ono's musical schooling and the inspiration
of her
fellow artists in the New York City scene of the late Fifties and early
Sixties.
Ono's musical career did not begin with Lennon.

illustration by Jason Stout

Originally, Ono's father wanted her to be a pianist, because he wanted to
be one,
but his dad wanted him to have a career in banking instead. When she
was 2,
Mr. Ono examined Yoko's hands to see if they would someday grow big enough to
stretch
an octave on the piano. "I really think that's when my fingers just kind
of
-- my hands just shrunk," she recalls, "because I was born a
rebel."

Ono's memories of her formative years flow freely only because she is
asked; it's
a time she rarely mentions in interviews, yet is crucial to understanding her
oeuvre.
A classically trained pianist who studied musical notation by the age of 4,
she ultimately
resisted using formal notation and developed her own style combining Western
and
Oriental forms. While studying composition as a child in Japan, she had a
prescient
homework assignment: to notate the sounds of her environment, from honking
car horns
to chirping birds. It made her hear the world in terms of music.

Ono and her father gave up on her being a great pianist, and since he felt
that
successful women composers were rare, he encouraged her to take vocal
lessons. And
with every subsequent exposure to increasingly extreme forms of opera and
classical
composition -- and with the revelations of hearing Kurt Weill, Bertolt
Brecht, and
Billie Holiday -- Ono developed an affection for vocal expression as an
instrument.

By 1957, after dropping out of Long Island's Sarah Lawrence College, Ono
fell
in with a group of radical artists and musicians, including one of her
inspirations,
John Cage ("I go, `Wow, so it's okay to be wacky'"). Once, while
recording
her voice as an experimental accompaniment to a 1961 Carnegie Recital Hall
concert,
the tape accidentally zipped into reverse. "I thought, `This is so
interesting.'
And I imitated that." Thus Ono's singular vocal modulations were
born.

"I was attracted to what the voice expresses in terms of human
suffering,"
she says. And her curdling emoting on the epochal Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono
Band
(1970), Ono's first album under her own name, ran the gamut. "And when I
was
screaming and all that kind of thing, somebody commented that this is too
theatrical
or dramatic. That's how it was perceived. Too animalistic. But we make those
noises
when we give birth to children. And so I was more interested in the sound of
inner
turmoil."

The intensity and angry quality of Ono's voice on YO/POB came about
in
part because she was trying to cut a swath through a loudly amplified band
that included
Lennon, who contributed some of the most inspired electric guitar playing of
his
life, as well as his famous drumming partner. "Ringo, you find him
totally amazing,"
says Ono with awe. "There's a dialogue that my voice and Ringo's
drumming are
doing. And it's just a very musically exciting experience."

Over the next 16 years and the course of seven more albums, Ono explored
the realm
of pop songcraft, often combining it with the experimental nature of her
early work.
Yet, when you listen to the bonus tracks included on the first four albums
(gentle
B-sides like "Remember Love" and stark demos like "Song For
John,"
both dating from the late Sixties), it becomes obvious that more conventional
songwriting
was always a part of her palette.

Fly (1971) includes hellfire rockers and magical love songs
alongside indulgent
soundtrack-like aural imagery, while both Approximately Infinite
Universe
(1972) and Feeling the Space (1973) are filled with songs of
interpersonal
relationships, character allegories, and political sloganeering. These are
albums
with moments of pure profundity as well as sheer awkwardness, sometimes
dated, and
at other moments timeless.

In 1973, following Space, Ono and Lennon separated for more than a
year;
when they reunited, she shelved an album called A Story (1974) to
avoid having
to answer questions about the lyrics written during their estrangement. It
was a
welcome, inspired inclusion as part of Onobox and will now be
available through
this current reissue campaign, as will the slickly produced It's
Alright (1982)
and Starpeace (1986), both of which offer texturally marvelous moments
and
spotty songwriting. The masterpiece of the Rykodisc series, however, is
Season
of Glass (1981).

An eloquent meditation on loss issued a mere four months after Lennon's
death,
Season of Glass was produced with the legendary Phil Spector until Ono
decided
(after the basic tracks were recorded) that the songs would benefit more from
sparseness
than a wall of sound. Although many of the compositions predate Lennon's
murder,
they fit together as a whole, including "I Don't Know Why," written
the
day after his death as revealed by the date of the newly added demo version:
December
9, 1980.

"I was in the bedroom and outside there were 2,000 people or
whatever. They
were all just screaming this and that. And I was like [lowers voice], `What?
What?
What?' And then the song came in me. And I thought, well, I better just --
because
whenever I don't record the song usually it just goes away and I forget
it."

One of the more notable aspects of Season of Glass is the cover, on
which
Central Park West is reflected through Lennon's bloodstained glasses.
Mentioning
that there were charges of exploitation levied at Ono for displaying his
famous spectacles
in this fashion elicits her most emotional response of our conversation:
"It
never for a moment, even for a moment, crossed my mind that it was somehow
using
him or anything like that. I mean, John and I were like one person at the
time. And
I saw this pair of glasses with his blood. And that's the thing that you have
seen.
But I've seen a floor with a pond of blood. And that was the reality. And
this was
like a very, very, mild expression of that. And I was totally amazed that
people
felt that I was exploiting him. It wasn't that at all. I felt the oneness
with him
and we were saying, `Please look at me. This is what you did to me.' I mean,
that's
what John wanted to say, I think."

At 64, Ono is poised for a year of art exhibitions, and maybe a new album
and
tour next year. With her spiky haircut and healthy appearance (she quit
smoking in
December), Ono's got everything she needs; she's an artist, and she only
looks back
when people ask her to. The Beatles asked her to, and she gave them a tape of
Lennon's
demos to concoct "new" songs for the Beatles' Anthology
series.

"I thought they did their best," she says of "Free as a
Bird"
and "Real Love." "It's a very difficult thing to do. One, John
is
not here. And for the three of them to get together to record John's songs,
it's
a very emotionally straining kind of situation. And I think they did a
beautiful
job."